I like the Internets ... a lot.

May 2007

05/30/2007

I've been personally involved in the iTunes U space for quite some time ... first as a member of the Apple Digital Campus group and then as a pilot University. For the longest time I have maintained that iTunes U is a good thing on a whole bunch of levels. iTunes itself is a very well designed cross platform media manager and player. It just works ... the integration with the iTunes Store takes the platform to a whole other level and that little iPod thing completes the eco-system. Most of what iTunes U gives us is very solid as well -- protected content areas that only faculty and enrolled students can access, subscriptions, public content areas, and really anything else that the iTunes Store can give you. It is a very nice environment that students and faculty find easy and intuitive to use and navigate.

My two biggest issues to date have been the inability to engage students in any sort of conversation (other than having them create a podcast rebuttal and upload it) and the inability to really navigate and find podcasts easily from the outside -- I'll call that last piece, discoverability. If you are in a given University's iTunes U space, life is fairly easy, but what if you are a student sitting on the outside and have no idea how to get to your files? You can't fire up a browser and google for it ... you have to know the right URL to get iTunes to launch and go to the iTunes U site at your school. It has been a problem. To compound the issue, it has been nearly impossible to find a way to easily take advantage of all the killer public content available across all the various iTunes U sites. Want some content from Penn State? Better know the URL ... ditto for Stanford, University of Michigan, and so on.

Today (or yesterday ...) that has changed. Apple rolled out an iTunes U directory from within the public iTunes Store. Jump over to Apple's Education site, click the link to launch the iTunes Store and take a peek at the little sites directory in the upper left ... notice that last item? Yep, it is a public landing page for a select group of iTunes U spaces. Finally I can easily show people what various spaces look like, access content from top schools, and feel like we are part of the iTunes Universe. I think this will help in a bunch of ways. One big one is the ability for Higher Education to get prominent placement in the World's top online music and podcast directory. Not too shabby, thanks Apple!

05/28/2007

By my own admission, I am not much of a gamer. Back in the day when I was a kid I would play text based games by Infocom on my 128K Mac ... after that, I've stayed away from computer games for the most part-- small amounts of time here and there, but serious addictions. Sure, I've had game consoles, but other than my Wii I haven't gotten the fever like most of my friends have since way back in the day. We've been doing a lot stuff in Second Life, but like we said in ETS Talk 25, SL isn't a game.

The last couple of weeks I have been into a game though -- not a million dollar production, but a simple little Flash game called, Desktop Tower Defense. I was at my sister's tonight for a picnic and all the guys were talking about it. Let me say it is good. Two things make it perfect in my mind ... the first is the simple game play. Those of us raised on the simplicity of the Atari 2600 know that one button is enough. The second thing that makes it really interesting is the social component. They make it really easy to set up a group and play against your friends. Just really smart stuff.

Looks like people are noticing. I came across a nice little post over at Giga Om that nails it. We need to be thinking about games in education, but we cannot ignore the simple options out there. Things don't have to be over the top to work. Desktop Tower Defense is the proof.

05/25/2007

I have only been following the rumors related to FaceBook's newest jump as an outsider -- the FaceBook Platform. Twice in the same day I am linking to GigOm ... this time a very well composed post explaining the new deal. From what I am making of it all, the FB will allow partners (whatever that means) to write specific apps that live on top of the FB. In other words, the FB could be looked at like an OS and these new apps can rest on its foundation. I am guessing this will let normal people (at some point) tap the power of the FB's data (and user profiles) to create new things that may only have interest to a subset of the users. This does all sorts of things if I understand it correctly, but one thing it does do is allow people to leverage the unbelievably active user base to create niche applications for specific vertical opportunities.

What this means to me is that I could write an application that linked FB traffic with say a course management system of sorts. Layering on top of the FB a whole host of CMS style tools -- discussion, quizzing, assignment posting, and really anything else ... and the students would never have to leave the FB. If I can do that, then maybe I would consider using the profile power of the FB to get at some very interesting content delivery options ... this is all just happening to me in the moment here, but I am thinking of allowing course materials to be presented to you at different levels depending on profile parameters -- foreign language students who say they've visited France may very well get more advanced podcasts of content to translate as an example. Students don't spend hours in our spaces like they do in the FB and in the FB they are spending some of that time crafting their profiles to better match either their real or stated identity. Update, this morning while hitting the feeds I bumped into one of the first apps to run on top of FB, Project Agape. It is essentially a "Causes" engine that now has deep integration with the FB. Very interesting stuff.

I need to do more reading and more investigation, but it seems to me that the Marketplace FB just released last week may be one of these such applications. I don't know that, but it would seem to make sense. I wonder what all this will mean for dedicated social sites who work to grab the typical FB demographic? If I can (or choose) to live in the FB, constantly crafting and honing my profile, why would I go to Flickr to share my pictures? Why would I need to blog outside the environment? Why for that matter, would I need to go to Google to find something? I know the web is the platform we all live on today, but there is something here.

Sorry for the rambling train wreck, but I need someone to help me think about this.

05/24/2007

A tip of the hat to Veronica Diaz from Maricopa on this little find ... the 23 Things open course designed and delivered from Glendale Community College in Arizona. Not much to say here, but fantastic. It is an open, self-paced eLearning course that guides learners through 23 things they should know about Web 2.0.

It got Brad Kozlek and I talking quite a bit about it today and we think this and our follow up thoughts will be featured this week on ETS Talk. Speaking of ETS Talk, I came across a very nice post about our little podcast show from Mike Briggs at Sun. Blows my mind that people are listening!

Running through the feeds this morning I came across a post over at GigaOm related to a tech panel the author, Liz Gannes, moderated recently. What makes it an interesting post is that the panel was made up of teens. We've been telling folks on campus and beyond about the habits of the net generation, but this post nails it. When people outside the academy begin discussing the traits of these kids I think we'll see great acceptance that what we say about them is true. I get the feeling that most of the time people think we are inflating the characteristics of this population. But for what it is worth, I am more of a believer that the current group of young people in and getting set to enter college are a special bunch. To me it means we can offer more interesting technical opportunities that they will use to support their time in higher education -- if we can gather some mind share from the place they all seem to love, the FaceBook.

05/22/2007

Tomorrow I am presenting to folks from the PSU Libraries. Originally this was going to be a small discussion, but it appears as though it has turned into a bigger deal. The talk will be available via the Libraries use of Media Site Live (Windows Media Player required) so tune if you are at all interested. The talk is tomorrow at 9 AM here on the east coast.

I think I'll probably reuse much of what I did at Maricopa with a little more hands-on demo time. We shall see how it all shakes down. What I am hoping for is an active audience and lots of conversation. Again, we shall see. Should be fun!

05/20/2007

I am an idiot. I have been a mad RSS fan for years ... I've used it to get access to the things I want to read for so long I've forgotten what it means to really "surf" the web. RSS Enclosures got me excited from day one, but I have never really grasped what so many others have gotten for far too long -- that RSS is pure content. I somehow missed the notion that RSS can provide more than my reader with reusable content -- anything in that feed can be used anywhere else.

A couple of weeks ago I watched a screencast by Brian Lamb that gave me the RSS ah-ha moment I had been missing ... he showed how simple it is to reuse content across sites from RSS. He used Allan Levine's Feed2JS site to take a feed and return a simple javascript to allow me to embed that any other place on the web. It seems so simple, but it took watching the screencast to really grasp it. I probably showed that screencast and the resulting technique to 20 people in the last 2-3 weeks ... it got me thinking about another little thing that we've been talking about for quite some time.

With the Blogs at Penn State pilot fully underway, we wanted a way to easily pull together all the blogs from ETS and display them as a meta blog -- a staff perspectives site so to speak. I didn't want to have to install another tool on one of our servers, I just wanted an easy way to make it all go. Enter Google Reader and its ability to share any content as a meta blog that you have in a tag. So, in Brian Lamb style, I threw together a very quick and dirty screencast showing how to use Google Reader to organize and share a mashed-up meta blog of content under a single tag. Once you start to see how this works, the ability to leverage the XML content of any feed becomes immediately obvious. We actually spent a bunch of time talking about it in the ETS Talk Podcast 24 a couple of weeks ago.

05/19/2007

For the last couple of Summers I have watched Apple roll out the schedules for their "Apple Camp" program for kids. I know it is tied to their retail strategy and all, but what a great program. I really think it provides an excellent model for the kinds of things we could do in higher education to get faculty, staff, and students engaged in being digital. I just love the simplicity of the marketing and programs. If I had an Apple Store anywhere near me, I would go explore and probably sign my 5 year old daughter up to participate.

The podcast session, for example, is only a couple hours long but it looks like they'll learn really everything they need to know to be a podcast producer. I know we can pull that kind of stuff off, because we do, but the way Apple packages it all makes me want to sign up. I am still struggling with how we can align our services with simple yet engaging opportunities to learn ... what am I missing that would help us get over the adoption hump with our audiences? How do we tie the introduction of new teaching and learning tools to interesting learning sessions? I wonder what others are doing.

05/18/2007

I spent the first three days of this week in Arizona presenting at Maricopa Community College's 20th Annual Teaching and Learning with Technology Conference. I was invited to be the event's featured speaker and also present at a breakout panel. I have to say I enjoyed the opportunity tremendously and enjoyed the campus, the people, and the event even more. One thing to keep in mind if you are traveling out to the valley of the sun -- it is hot. It took exactly one minute after we landed for someone to give me the, "yeah, but it is a dry heat" line. It didn't feel all that dry to me ... jeez I don't think it ever dipped under 100.

A very smart and passionate group of faculty took part in a day-long event that saw somewhere in the neighborhood of what looked to be 150-170 people. One of the really cool things about the whole thing is that the Maricopa system is made up of a very diverse set of campuses -- all of them do a nice job of coming together around the topic of teaching and learning though. The event also drew a bunch of people from other area schools -- the brief conversation I had with the folks from Arizona State was very interesting and it gave me some instant ideas on integrating all the tools we've been working on to make it easier for faculty to select the services they want in their classes. I have to say it makes me think of the Edison Services toolset we built while I was at the Solutions Institute.

My breakout session was essentially the Web 2.0 in the PSU Enterprise talk I have been giving for quite some time now ... I added a piece on using Web 2.0 philosophies to support and grow communities as well. The talk was well received, but I didn't feel the typical energy in the room. I have a hard time talking to other schools about the stuff we are doing at PSU ... I just don't like that vibe all that much. It worried me a bit for the featured talk, but when the time came the audience was ready and willing to rock along with me. The talk felt great and it seemed like it struck a chord with a majority of the audeince.

My talk was titled, "Enabling the New Classroom Conversation." I literally changed it up an hour before because of the intense focus on the Net Generation that the morning keynote provided. I ended up making some quick changes right before going on stage ... I actually like what emerged better. It was greared again at taking the underlying notions of Web 2.0 and applying them to the classroom -- not solely as technology, but as consistant princliples for cooperation, collaboration, and participation. The point I was trying to make is that there is something very exciting and interesting going on with the new breed of social tools out there that we should be paying very close attention to. These tools do amazing things to engage people and we should be working very hard to integrate these types of approaches. I was working to make the case that these tenants can lead us towards David Warlock's School 2.0 concept ... this is where I am spending all of my time these days ... All in all, it went well.

Cool thing is that one thing usually leads to another. I've been asked by a couple of the participants if I would be interested in keynoting their events in the near future -- of course! I have to give a shout out to the CogDog for making the recommendation to the good people at Maricopa. When I mentioned his name during the lunch talk several people clapped! They love you there, Allan! Thanks again for introducing me to a passionate group of faculty and staff.

05/11/2007

What is more powerful than a massive location aware social network? Why, its the FaceBook Marketplace. Looks like everyone's favorite campus hang out spot is getting into the clasified ads business -- for free. Don't be fooled, there is a business model in there. If you jump over to the NY Times you can read all the details in the piece, Facebook to Offer Free Classifieds. From the article ...

Facebook, based in Palo Alto, Calif., is calling the new service Marketplace and plans to introduce it on Friday. It will allow users to create classified listings in four categories: housing; jobs; for sale, where users can list things like concert tickets and used bikes; and “other,” a catch-all that could include things like solicitations for rides home for the holidays.

This creates an interesting campus market place that could drive even more traffic through the FB. I have to say I think I know where I am going to be placing my ads to sell some of that old stuff I have. If you think about it, where else could I go to really reach this demographic? The University newspaper, maybe. A flyer to hang on a classroom wall, eh. But with this, the FB folks have pegged the three things you need to do business -- location, location, loaction ... oh, and a built in network of connected, trusted, co-located friends doesn't hurt either. This is worth watching.

What I am curious about is how they will provide value to the marketplace concept using all that is right about social networking. I am wondering if there will be Amazon style recommendations based on my profile or the profile of my friends. Will I see items for sale from friends first? If so, will I be more likely to buy. On campus we hear from students that they go to trusted sources first when they need help with things like technology and coursework ... will that translate into the buying experience? I am betting on that being a yes. I wonder what others think?